Chapter 1

Of my as-yet-untitled novel.

So, here is the first chapter of my novel. If you take the time to read it, first of all, thank you, and second, please consider letting me know what you think. Did you like anything in particular, or did you not like anything? What worked well? What fell flat? This is a first draft so I’m not precious about it. I’m here to learn.

I’ll be releasing the next chapter in 2 weeks time.

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The impact shocked my back, square between the shoulder blades, and shot down my arms like lightning as they reflexively distributed the force. I knew the back of my head had hit the floor too but late enough that my body had already sent its adrenal first responders in anticipation of the contact. All I felt was a kind of dull thud.

Dazzled by the harsh puck lights embedded in the low ceiling, I rolled over on my left tricep, pushing upwards and trying to disentangle myself from the mangled wooden table I’d just been slammed through. The speed of said slamming meant that it felt more like a layer of slightly denser air, a brief change in sensation on my way to the terminus of the steel deck. Somewhere above me, I heard some sympathetic oohs and aahs as some onlookers winced. It wasn’t a wholly uncommon sight. In fact, some of the regular clientele were there with the express purpose of taking in a show.

“Okay…” I wheezed as I crawled out from under the debris. “I may have made a mistake…” To myself mostly.

The floor grew dark and I felt the hulking presence dominate the space above me. Huge hands picked me up by the scruff and flipped me onto my back again, somewhat gentler this time. Less height. The figure, made silhouette by the lights he now eclipsed, moved so much faster than I’d expected. I felt something give with a POP in the centre of my face as a fist, almost the size of my head crashed in for the comparison. 

Right, time to go. 

I looked around for some advantage. Any advantage. To my right, a chunk of table leg blurred into existence. It was about a foot long, had one neatly squared end and came to a splintering point at the other. He must’ve seen my intention a mile off because he reached down and grabbed me by the lapels, pulling me upward in an attempt to distance me from the stake.

Too slow this time.

I planted my feet on his knees letting him lever me up, and I drove the spike into his armpit. I felt it strike the shoulder joint and eject it from its seat. Half his grip shut down as his left arm went limp. With one hand on the spike and the other in his coat pocket, a moment passed where he screamed into my face with breath I can’t even describe. I pushed off with my legs, taking the spike with me with enough ripping force to distract him from his remaining grip.

I landed on one foot and staggered backwards till I hit the wall, my skull bouncing off the sheet plastic. With all the coordination I could summon, I hurled the spike down the length of the bar hoping to ruffle enough feathers to create a distraction. It was the kind of place where spilling the wrong drink could land you in the gutter with fewer teeth than you started with. If not an airlock. And there were still some patrons at the bar quietly enjoying their drinks in the midst of the brawl. The proprietor of the bar watched the carnage with mild amusement.

Khalo has always been that way, great nightlife but you’ve got to be careful not to step on any toes or fragile egos. One throwaway word could land you in some deep shit. Nowhere on Khalo was that more true than the Cho district, named for Mingzhu Cho, a Chinese businesswoman who opened the first commercial hotel on Khalo. Now a bustling precinct of hotels, bars, casinos and restaurants, Cho usually has a healthy contingent of truckers, stopping for a few days on their way to Luyten, or Sol, for their first real social interaction in over a year. Not to mention some welcome ‘gravity’. Back and forth between orbital platforms, they rarely experience real gravity in their career, a week here, a few days there. And in most cases, they spend the journey in solitude with nothing but a few hundred tons of cargo and some government-approved entertainment to keep them company. So, when they do come out to play, they don’t hold back. Long-haul solitary space travel seems to make people a little unhinged.

Not unlike the weedy, bug-eyed trucker who spun on his neighbour at the bar, looking like they had just slapped his grandmother, eyes growing wider by the second as the rage accumulated, fueled by the Khalo homebrew that now pooled on the pocked surface of the bar. Lightning fast, the weedy trucker buried his forehead in his neighbour’s face before a bottle exploded around his ears, wielded by a fierce-looking bounty hunter. They had short, styled hair and elfin features contorted into a mad grin and eyes that darted around looking for their next target. A moment of eye contact made me think it was going to be me, which made me put my back against the wall again in an attempt to flee, until the wounded brute shoved past them, directing their attention elsewhere. The bounty hunter climbed onto the bar and leapt into the fray as the chain reaction unfolded from one side of the room to the other, in unison with a sudden crescendo in the dubwave pumping out of the cheap speakers set in the ceiling.

“En! EN!! Hey!”

I turned toward my name, blearily trying to convince my eyes to converge on something. Cora was holding the side door open to my right, waving her arm in an attempt to make me move quicker. The light from the ad boards outside glinted off the metal buckles of the utilitarian harness she wore over her shoulders and gave me something to focus on. I could make out the inverted sheath fastened to the harness above her right breast and the butt of her stunbolter tucked under her left arm. She rarely used them but once told me that their presence was comforting, and on Khalo it was never a bad idea to arm yourself.

I pushed off the wall with my back, reminding myself of the throb radiating across my shoulders and up the back of my neck. As soon as I was supporting myself on two feet, it was clear how much of a friend the wall was being. Like the rare and noble sober companion who takes it upon themselves to haul you to a bunk when your legs stop working, something Cora had done for me on more than one occasion. 

I looked back at the wall with gratitude then back to Cora. Every time my vision corrected itself she seemed further away. Her eyes were stony orbs, shallow-set under thick brows that plunged into her long nose. Her hair was light brown but had a slight coppery quality when the light hit it the right way, which it did now as it tumbled over the olive skin of her collarbone. She wore a sleeveless button down shirt under the harness and a pair of drab cargo pants customised with several extra pockets and stashes. They were cinched into military-style combat boots that gave her a good two inches of height beyond her natural five and a half feet.

Wrestling bodies strayed in front of me that I tried my best to circumnavigate, no easy feat when your head is spinning. 

“Scuse me. Sorry, Pardon me” I said, channelling my mother’s english politeness.

Something large soared, uncomfortably close, past my face and shattered on the wall to my right. I reacted about a second later. No idea what it was, a barstool maybe?

When I was close enough, Cora grabbed my collar and pulled me out of the doorway and round a bulkhead the colour of rust, where the sound of brawling and dubwave wasn’t quite as obnoxious.

“I thought we were keeping a low profile?!” She said, prodding my shoulder. I flinched.

“I was! That…” jabbing a thumb towards the maelstrom inside Connor’s Bar “...was not my doing!”

“Sure!” She shook her head and looked around before lowering her voice. “Something’s happened.”

She made a motion with her head, indicating the newscast on the large holodisplay on the other side of the square. If you could call it a square, it was more like an intersection of corridor that was wide enough for a cluster of bars and food stalls.

“What?” I said, craning my neck uncomfortably to get a better look.

It showed station security barriers cordoning off what used to be a stall, and what was now a blackened mess of bowed sheet metal and melted silicone. Del’s Data Dominion. Del was my contact and fence for most of the contracts I had worked for the last year. She was a lukshae. Well connected, tough, and sharp. Not much happened on Khalo that she didn’t know about, and nothing in Cho. I didn’t think anyone was stupid enough to fuck with her.

“Oh.” I said soberly “somebody blew it?”

She said nothing.

Yeah, dumb question, Hagen.

“Well…shit!”

She was silent for a long time as we both looked on towards Del’s stall. It was a wreck. The aluminium frame bloomed outwards, away from the origin of the blast, scorched and wilted. No sign of Del anywhere. The station’s fire suppression systems would have dealt with the fire pretty quickly, so it must’ve been a pretty powerful blast to do that kind of damage.

“When did this happen?”

“About 15 minutes ago. I’m not getting a response from her”

She seemed genuinely worried. It was only then I saw the dim orange glow from her SubCom under the skin of her temple. It flashed slowly for a few seconds then stopped. Then flashed slowly again before stopping again.

“Ugh” She said, exasperated. “It’s not even establishing a connection.”

“So what do you want to do?” I asked.

“We need to find Del.”

“Ok, but we’re not getting anywhere near that stall. Look.” I pointed to the holodisplay showing a cadre Khalo Station Security, Khal-Sec. They had the entire area cordoned off.

“Shit.” She said. “Maybe somebody knows what happened, or has heard something?”

“Maybe Gorda?” A lukshae weapons dealer on Khalo.

Untrustworthy. And he would want something in return for possibly shoddy info. Definitely has a contact in Khal-Sec, though.

“No way. Don’t trust him as far as I could throw him.” She said.

“To be fair…”

“Nope.” She was resolute.

“Right.”

Probably for the best.

After a moment of quiet contemplation amidst the din of Cho;

“What about Liv?” She asked.

I winced. “I actually owe her money, so…”

“How much?”

“Enough that I’d rather be off her radar.”

Cora shot me some side-eye loaded that was with reproach.

“Adio?” She asked.

“I don’t know who that is.”

“I’ve told him about you before. C’mon.”

I nodded my approval before it dawned on me.

“Wait, what? What did you tell him about me? And why?” 

No reply. She just started walking.

“And when?”

We lost ourselves in the throng of shoppers and half-drunk Cho patrons before catching a lift up to Cho Central.

***

Khalo Station is like an oasis smack-bang in the middle of a desert. The midpoint in the long journey from Earth to Luksha. Sol to Luyten. Five jumps on either side and about a month of coasting between each. Well, they call them ‘jumps’ but it’s more like short bursts of drive time when they can get the trucks travelling faster than light, usually about two days. Current drive tech can’t cope with much more than that. It was built as a simple pit stop where truckers could rest for a few days on their journey. Over the last 150 years, thanks to human engineering and lukshae technology, rebuilds and renovations have turned it into a centre of commerce, research, and of course, vice for both sides of the Bond. Neutral ground. The station is home to over 2 million humans and lukshae with varying degrees of economic standing. Many are employed in maintenance and security capacities, others operate businesses or work for those who do. Even legitimate businesses, though, don’t strictly adhere to Earth or Luksha Law. Khalo has become its own unofficial sovereignty with it’s own set of unofficial laws. Not to mention the base of operations for several piracy outfits, organised crime syndicates, and people like us, who take work where they can get it. Even if it’s not strictly legal. Khalo is a corrupt, slightly oblique, cylindrical city floating in the void between the only two stars we know for sure support life.

 Cora and I had already been working together for a long time when Del’s stall was hit. Most of the time, the contracts we took were data retrieval or small-time theft. The odd job would come along that actually required some planning and resources, and those paid well enough that we could usually take a few weeks off afterwards if only to lay low. Working for mafiosos and space pirates could be fun, but it could get you noticed by the wrong people, and when that happened it was best to keep to yourself for a while.

I grew up on Earth surrounded by, and enamoured with technology and net systems, so I was more than capable of working as a tech. Cora spent 13 years on Luksha learning how to control her body and mind. Lukshae martial arts focus on being methodical in your movements, knowing when to conserve energy, when to unleash it, and where to channel it. It was also about being able to temper your emotions so that you were never a slave to them, something she was still working on. In any case, there weren’t many asses she couldn’t kick. 

Over the years we’d taught each other a thing or two and we’d become a pretty effective team.

“You are such a moron, you know that?” She turned to face me in the hydraulic lift.

I feigned an emotional wound, with my hand on my chest.

“You realise starting that fight was incredibly stupid, right? All you’ve done is draw attention to yourself. To us. Where’s the mark now?”

“Dunno.” I shrugged. “I had to stab him in the shoulder and he ran off.”

“YOU WHAT?!?!”

“In the shoulder!!” I said, defensively.

She’s gonna punch me.

“FOR FU–”

“–Cora, listen, he’s probably fine.” I said with my palms up.

“THAT’S BESIDES THE–” Her volume dropped and her jaw stopped moving. “We’re supposed to be keeping a low profile, not running around starting bar fights and stabbing people!” She said through bared teeth.

The dirty window let in some ambient light as the lift cleared the shorter structures that filled the spaces between tall, sloping arcologies, their tops stretching towards the central cavity.

“I guarantee you, nobody in that bar recognised me, they were all truckers minding their own business. Except for our large friend, obviously.”

Here it comes.

She tutted and stood with her arms folded facing away from me. “We’ll never find the drive now. He’s probably long gone, and with him is our paycheck. A fat one too.”

Maybe not...

“I think it’s fine”

She spun with fury.

“How do you suppose we–” Immediately doused into bemusement as I twirled the data drive between my fingers with a smug smile on my face.

The lift doors irised open and Cora stormed out, data drive in her left hand, blowing cool breath over the knuckles of her right. I followed, nursing my left eye. 

It’s like getting hit with a sledgehammer. Every time.

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